Main Race Lift Discussion

Several entries dealing with live action actors and/or portrayals of real life figures (or characters that the editing tropers seemed to deem as universally known) fail to state their race/ethnicity. Someone with a bit of free time would do well to go through and add the details to entries that omit them. As it stands, unfamiliar readers would have to click through to actors' pages to confirm assumptions.

Also a case of Age Lift because Amadeus shouldn't have even been alive in that time frame.

What time frame? The comics don't have one, they have Comic-Book Time. And the film's set in the Present Day, so if you're going to insist on getting dates to match up, it's surely that Banner's too young, not that Cho shouldn't be born yet. Except that Banner isn't too young because in the comics, Banner doesn't age that much.

And because of that latter point, you can't tie it to the date of Hulk's origin, because Comic-Book Time doesn't work that way; the Bruce Banner who meets Cho in the comics has not been the Hulk since 1962. He's been the Hulk for ... a while, but not so long that he's in his 40s. Five years is probably about right.

Is there a better quote we could use? The current one does a good job explaining the situation, but I feel it (perhaps unintentionally) casts the trope in an inherently negative light. Specifically, the bit where the Strawman character tells the fanboy he's a racist if he has a problem with race lifts, which comes across as saying the trope itself is Political Correctness Gone Mad.

It's a bit odd to have Ben Kingsley as The Mandarin under "Type Two: Non-White to White." The Mandarin is, according to this article, half white English and half Chinese, while Ben Kingsley is half white English and half Gujurati Indian. While it is a noticeable difference in racial make-up, both the character and the actor share the same proportion of white heritage, and therefore claiming that the change is "Non-White to White" seems inaccurate and misplaced.

LogoP

01:41:47 PM Jul 15th 2014

It should be corrected and noted that the race lift was actually from half white, half-chinese to half-white, half-indian, then.

Shouldn't the Anime and Manga examples of "changing a race from a minority to a majority" be examples of changing non-Japanese characters Japanese? For them, Japanese IS the majority, and other races are the minority, and unless the story is taking place in a specific place or the character's races are somehow revealed they are all assumed to be Japanese, regardless of how Caucasian or ambiguously brown they look. Japanese media is primarily Japan-centric, and currently the examples are more western-centric. I understand why, but it just doesn't make much sense to count Asians as a minority in a genre of media where they aren't.

I was thinking that a General example would be how the Romans' physical appearance is portrayed. While most Romans tended to be dark-haired and tan-skinned, Romans in Anglophone productions are almost exclusively fair-skinned and more often fair-haired than was the case in real life. Some would argue that this is due to a lack of the former and surplus of the latter in these countries' acting communities, but people who actually look like the ancient Romans are often seen as slaves.

The Avatar: The Last Airbender example is more complex than this trope, methinks, since the Four Nations are explicitely fantasy peoples only loosely based on real-world ethnicities, and the series itself uses an Animesque template. If anything, I feel that the people on the so-called "correct" side of the debate are more offensive, since they keep insisting that Whatever Element Nation must be the equivalent of some real-world peoples.

Okay, I started just adding a couple of "ways" to the list (which already said "one of three ways" and then listed four ways when I got here) and then realized they needed examples in the sections below and it kind of got away from me. For the record, I move a couple of "miscellaneous or mixed race" examples up into the new types I added, so if someone comes along and removes the new types I added, you can drop the examples back under Misc. I didn't move any from types 1-3.

Has anyone noticed that the Boondocks quote also illustrates the racism of the speaking character? The implications of the quote would seem to imply that having a black Jesus would be more accurate. In fact, any historical Jesus would have been a Semitic Jew.

Hey, Wuggles, why did you remove "* Caused a controversy with Justine Larbaleister's book Liar. The book is about a black girl with short hair who is a compulsive liar. The first cover was shown to be a white girl with long hair. The publishing company claimed that white readers would not want to read it if it had a black person on it. The author and many other people raised questions about it. Finally the cover was re-done with a black girl."?
At first I thought maybe you were removing an overlap with Covers Always Lie that belonged there, but according to that page the overlap between the tropes belongs here.

Is Race Lift really the best name for this? It implies elevation, which either has Unfortunate Implications or is just not applicable in many circumstances (eg Samuel L. Jackson in Room 213.) Perhaps it should be renamed Race Shift? I know there's some mechanism for name changes, but I don't know how to start it.

I cut the below quote because it really isn't a good one to illustrate the trope. If you were to read it seperate from the page, you would think it is something along the lines of Fake Nationality. And even still, a vague remark from a live-journal blogger that requires a bit of explanation to clarify just doesn't make a good top quote.

Katara and Sokka (from The Last AirbenderLive Action film) look like they fell out of a bad Edwardian novel about two upper-class English kids who get lost in the Icy Wasteland Of The North ...

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